ਭਾਈ ਮਰਦਾਨਾ ਜੀਭਾਈ ਮਰਦਾਨਾ ਜੀ

Bhai Mardana Ji (1459 to 1534) was the rabab player who walked beside ਗੁਰੂ ਨਾਨਕ ਦੇਵ ਜੀ for most of his life: his childhood friend in Talwandi, his companion through the long journeys called the udasis, and the musician whose strings carried the Guru's hymns to every village, town and court they entered. Born into a Muslim Mirasi family of hereditary musicians, he became one of the first followers of the Guru, and Sikh tradition counts him as the first rababi, the founding figure of the music that still sounds in every gurdwara.

Who was Bhai Mardana Ji?

Bhai Mardana Ji was Guru Nanak Dev Ji's lifelong companion and minstrel. The Janamsakhi accounts, the traditional life stories of Guru Nanak, make him ten years older than the Guru and a playmate from the same village lanes. When Guru Nanak sang his divinely inspired verses, it was Mardana who set them to music on the rabab, a plucked string instrument. The two names travel together through five centuries of Sikh memory: in almost every early painting of Guru Nanak, Mardana sits beside him, instrument in hand.

A childhood in Talwandi

Mardana was born in 1459 at Rai Bhoi di Talwandi, the village now known across the world as ਨਨਕਾਣਾ ਸਾਹਿਬ, in Sheikhupura district of present day Pakistan. His father was Badra and his mother Lakkho, of the Mirasi community, hereditary minstrels and genealogists whose craft was music and memory. Tradition says he was the seventh child of the couple and the first to survive, and that his birth name, Marjana, meaning one who will die, was changed by Guru Nanak to Mardana, one who will not die. The Miharban Janamsakhi says the young Mardana sang to Nanak the verses of Bhagat Kabir, Bhagat Trilochan, Bhagat Ravidas, Bhagat Dhanna and Bhagat Beni, so the hymns of the saints were part of his music from childhood.

When Guru Nanak was working at the stores of the Nawab at ਸੁਲਤਾਨਪੁਰ ਲੋਧੀ, his father Mehta Kalu sent Mardana there to bring back news of his son. Mardana went, and never really came back: from that meeting the two stayed together for the rest of their lives. By then Mardana was a married man, the father of two sons and a daughter.

The rabab and the great journeys

Before the journeys began, Mardana held back for one honest reason: his daughter still had to be married, and he did not have the means. A disciple of the Guru, Bhai Bhagirath, provided what was needed, the wedding took place, and Mardana was free to walk. Tradition also tells how Guru Nanak sent him to Bhai Firanda, a carpenter and musician of Bhairowal, to fetch a rabab of exactly the right sound, the instrument that became Mardana's signature in every painting and every story.

The udasis took the pair across the Punjab and far beyond it, through India and, in the traditional accounts, to Mecca and Baghdad. Wherever they stopped, the pattern was the same: Mardana tuned the rabab, Guru Nanak sang, and a sangat, a gathered congregation, formed around the music. That pairing of hymn and rabab is the seed of kirtan, the singing of Gurbani that stands at the centre of Sikh worship to this day.

What did Bhai Mardana Ji do on the journeys?

In the Janamsakhi stories Mardana does far more than play music. He is the voice of ordinary human doubt. He gets hungry, tired, frightened and homesick, and he says so, and each time his question or complaint draws out a teaching from Guru Nanak that the story then carries. The Puratan Janamsakhi tells of storms, forests and hunger on the road, and of the two being taken prisoner at Saidpur during Babur's invasion. Because Mardana asks the questions every traveller asks, readers across the centuries have seen themselves in him, and the Guru's answers reach them through him.

His own verse in the Guru Granth Sahib

Mardana was also a poet. One of his saloks, his couplets, stands in the Guru Granth Sahib in Bihagre ki Var, alongside two saloks of Guru Nanak addressed to him. In his verse he holds that a life stained by wrongdoing can be cleansed in sangat, the company of the holy (Guru Granth Sahib, page 553). Guru Nanak's saloks addressed to Mardana warn against the wine of worldly craving and praise instead the wine of good conduct, truth and the divine Name. That the Guru's own bani speaks directly to his companion, and that the companion's verse was kept in the scripture, shows the place Mardana held in the founding circle.

Last days at Kartarpur

After the journeys, Guru Nanak settled at ਕਰਤਾਰਪੁਰ on the banks of the Ravi, and Mardana, old and worn by decades of travel, settled there with him. In 1534 he fell ill and died at Kartarpur, aged about 75. The Janamsakhi account of his passing is one of the most loved passages in the tradition: asked how his body should be disposed of, Mardana answered that the Guru's teaching had taken away his pride in the body altogether, and it could be treated as the Guru wished. Guru Nanak had his body consigned to the River Ravi, had the Sohila read, and distributed karah parshad. He then asked Mardana's son Shahzada to stay on in his father's place, and Shahzada served as the Guru's minstrel after him. A separate tradition links Mardana's memory with Baghdad, where an inscription remembered him as Murad, and some accounts place a memorial to him there; scholars differ on that journey's end, and the Kartarpur account remains the one the main Janamsakhi tradition tells.

How is Bhai Mardana Ji remembered today?

Every rababi who leads kirtan with the rabab, and every painting of Guru Nanak with his companion at his side, keeps Mardana's memory alive. His descendants continued as rababis, and the rabab itself, revived in recent decades after falling out of common use, is again heard in gurdwaras around the world. For Sikhs he stands for something larger than music: a Muslim born minstrel who became the first disciple, proof from the very beginning that Guru Nanak's sangat was open to everyone, whatever their birth.